1844 Braided Hair Coronet Head Cent - Braided Hair Large Cent Newcomb-5 Obverse Rim Cud

Description

On the 1844 Braided Hair large cent, this obverse rim cud on die marriage Newcomb-5 records the loss of part of the obverse die's rim gutter between the 6 o'clock and 7 o'clock positions, which appears on the coin as a raised interruption in the design rim that tracks the rim's course. The 6-to-7 o'clock position on the obverse places the cud in the lower-left quadrant, near the date area or the adjacent drapery and stars of Christian Gobrecht's Braided Hair Liberty design. Gobrecht's final large cent obverse — Liberty wearing a braided hair arrangement with a coronet inscribed LIBERTY — served from 1839 through the denomination's termination in 1857, and the N-5 die marriage was cataloged by Howard R. Newcomb in his comprehensive study of United States copper cents. Philadelphia produced approximately 2.40 million large cents in 1844. The Newcomb numbering system assigns sequential numbers to each documented die pair for a given date, with N-5 representing the fifth identified combination of obverse and reverse dies for 1844. The raised interruption in the rim is typically visible to the unaided eye, though a loupe at 5-7x magnification helps assess the break's extent and confirm the N-5 die marriage through comparison of other obverse and reverse die characteristics against published reference images.

Cross References

• Newcomb N-5